PATRIARCHY

hypothetical social system based on the absolute authority of the father or an elderly male over the family group. Inspired by the classical social Darwinism of the 19th century, the pioneering anthropologists Lewis Henry Morgan and Henry Maine envisioned cultures as having developed through evolutionary stages, one of which was patriarchy. Maine felt that all status or relationship in the earliest societies derived from a patriarchal kinship system and that all decisions of social consequence were the arbitrary judgments of a quasi-tyrannical patriarch. Sometimes patriarchy also includes in its meaning patria potestas, the system in which power to govern members of even the extended family rested in the hands of a father. Although Morgan did undertake ethnographic work of nonliterate societies, Maine based his conclusions almost entirely on records of ancient Greece and Rome. Later anthropologists were skeptical of such evolutionary schemes, and ethnographers found absolute male authority to be rare even in societies with patrilineal descent systems. The word patriarchy, therefore, has fallen into disuse as a technical or categorical term.